Advantage prioritization of digital carbon footprint awareness in optimized urban mobility using fuzzy Aczel Alsina based decision making

Abstract

City governments prioritize mobility in urban planning and policy. Greater mobility in a city leads to happier citizens. Although enhanced urban mobility is helpful, it comes with costs, notably in terms of climate change. Transportation systems that enable urban mobility often emit greenhouse gases. Cities must prioritize digital carbon footprint awareness. Cities may reduce the environmental impact of urban mobility while keeping its benefits by close monitoring and reducing the carbon footprint of digital technologies like transportation applications, ride-sharing platforms, and smart traffic control systems. The aim is to advantage prioritize three alternatives, namely doing nothing, upgrading and optimizing data centers and networks, and using renewable energy sources for data centers and networks to minimize the digital carbon footprint using the proposed decision making tool. This study consists of two stages. In the first stage, fuzzy Aczel-Alsina functions (fuzzy Aczel-Alsina weighted assessment — ALWAS method) based Ordinal Priority Approach (OPA) is proposed to find the weights of criteria. Secondly, fuzzy ALWAS Combined Compromise Solution (CoCoSo) model is improved to evaluate and choose the best alternative among the three alternatives. The improved ALWAS-CoCoSo model enables flexible nonlinear processing of uncertain information and simulation of different risk levels. Besides, we proposed the improved fuzzy OPA algorithm for processing uncertain and incomplete information. The case study is provided to the decision-makers to advantage prioritize the alternatives based on twelve criteria organized into four aspects, including digital carbon footprint, externalities, technical capability, and economics. The ranking results reveal that A3=2.445 is the best among the three alternative, while A1=1.705 is the worst alternative. The results show that the best way to reduce the digital carbon footprint is to use renewable energy sources to power data centers and networks (A3).